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The private cloud experience is something that, during last years, has become more and more usual in every daily work for every kind of user.

The need to have a safe place to keep and conserve our digital life has had, as answer, the birth of many services that offer the opportunity to store our data, giving a new meaning to the word freedom: a simple connection and you have all your world, just a click away.

Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, UbuntuOne itself, the so-called cloud services are getting very popular these days, but they require to trust an outside server using proprietary code.

A free back way to fulfill these requirements, breaking out from this non-free trend, could be offered by ownCloud, a system that tries to offer the same functionality as these services (eg., a place to store your files, address books and calendars), but does so as a free software project.

These are the reasons pushing GNOME developers to work to integrate ownCloud features in next releases.

«I think it makes sense for GNOME (as a free software project) to have a good integration with ownCloud – said Debarshi Ray, rishi on GIMPnet, who’s working on it – This let everyone to have his own ownCloud server».

Debarshi worked on previous release cycle on SkyDrive integration within GNOME and now, as part of the effort that will lead us to future GNOME 3.8 release in spring, he expects to expose onwCloud features in GNOME itself.

«Well, regarding integration in GNOME – rishi said – our life has been made easier by the fact that ownCloud supports well known standards for applications to interface with the server. eg., WebDAV for accessing the files, CardDAV for the address-books, and CalDAV for calendars».

When it will be ready, every ownCloud account will be shown as a classic volume icon in GNOME, just like a pen drive or a hard disk, so all files stored on it will be reached by Files application as well as the file chooser. Moreover ownCloud will be integrated within Documents application, just like Google Drive and SkyDrive, allowing us to manage our file within the brand new GNOME3 experience.

And, of course, the same will happen in the near future for addressbooks and calendars, automatically added to related applications and services. By now Debarshi has just committed the code you need to add an ownCloud account to GNOME Online Accounts.

ownCloud offers to everyone the opportunity to participate to a new concept of cloud in which you can use the same protocols and programs to access, at the same time, at your own private data on your own home server, or on your remote always-on server or your work data on your company servers, or even to sign up and use an ownCloud account provided by third parts. A list of currently known ownCloud service providers is available on ownCloud website.

«ownCloud is the first free software “cloud service” that we are integrating into GNOME3 – Rishi said – There was a growing suspicion that GNOME was only targetting proprietary cloud providers like Google or Microsoft. So I hope people, especially those who are concerned about the privacy of their data, find it useful».

Nowadays privacy is not only related to our private dimension, but it concerns the places and the ways that store our digital life. A full, free software based solution to private cloud can help us to trust the cloud itself, and allow us to access from everywhere with every device (PCs, tablets, smartphones, TVs, game consoles) safely and reliability, because we are the ones bringing the ring that rules them all.

Nowadays freedom runs outside the code that runs on our computer: it’s on cloud, better if on ownCloud.